[KS] Call for participants in Sept 2026 conference in Buffalo

[Kristin Stapleton]

Dear colleagues,



The University at Buffalo is organizing a conference on fictional/creative representations of war in Asia, particularly the wars in the middle of the 20th-century (WWII/Asia-Pacific War), which will follow up on and expand a panel organized on that topic for the 2024 AAS-in-Asia meeting in Yogyakarta. The five scholars who participated in that panel will take part, as will several new recruits (see abstract and list of current participants below).



The conference will take place in Buffalo on September 24 and 25, 2026. Participants’ travel expenses will be covered by the University at Buffalo Office of International Education.



We would like to recruit specialists on this topic, particularly experts on Korea and Southeast Asia, to join us—historians interested in literary representations or literary scholars with a historical approach. If you are interested, please send your two-page CV, along with a proposed paper title and abstract, to Kristin Stapleton at kstaple at buffalo.edu<mailto:kstaple at buffalo.edu>. The deadline for consideration is Monday, November 24. Please share this call for participants via your scholarly networks.



The plan at this point is to write, present, and comment on papers/chapters that will each have a section that briefly introduces the body of creative works on the wars of the 1930s and 1940s in the language the author does scholarly work in and then focuses on a case study that is particularly interesting. Given the breadth of the topic, we expect to exclude film, but we are open to a conversation among the participants about this.



We look forward to hearing from interested scholars!



Sincerely,

The conference collective



Conference Draft title: Imaginative Interpretations of Global War in Asia

World War II and other interrelated wars shaped Asia profoundly. Historical accounts rightly emphasize how the wars of the 1930s and 1940s contributed to decolonization, the realignment of global politics that gave birth to the Cold War and the non-aligned movement, mass migration, and other phenomena of global significance. Many more perspectives on the effects of the war are evident in Asian-language fiction and poetry that is as yet little known beyond the regions in which it was produced. Our conference brings together scholars who focus on literary accounts of the wars that emerged in different Asian localities and assess how they challenge or supplement conventional accounts of the war. We aim to publish the conference papers in a volume that will offer both an overview of literary accounts of the war from various parts of Asia and analysis of particularly interesting examples. We aim to enrich understandings of the local, regional, and global experience of war in the middle of the twentieth century.



Scholars already planning to participate:

Reeti Basu and Kristin Stapleton explore fiction produced during and immediately after the war in Bengal and western China, respectively, highlighting and analyzing how local authors interpreted the arrival of soldiers and outside authorities in communities strategically important to the combatants. David Stahl investigates the lived psychosocial dynamics / actual embodied experience of constituting narrative memory of dissociated battlefield experience "belatedly" and from a "displaced" location and POV by re-examining and recontextualizing Ōoka's Fires on the Plain from a trauma studies perspective. Shraddha Kumbhojkar examines Marathi literature produced in the 1940s, revealing how the experience of war transformed it as a genre as authors eschewed romanticism and turned to anti-colonial politics. Andrew Amstutz discusses how WWII shaped Urdu political projects in Karachi before the creation of Pakistan by examining Urdu short stories dealing with the war's disruptions of economic and social life in the port city. Coraline Jortay examines autobiographical writings produced during and immediately after WWII by Chinese women who documented life in wartime Europe, investigating how their stories bring the Eastern and Western fronts of WWII in resonance with one another. Uddipana Goswami analyzes more recent fiction that reflects on the war, rereading a recent novel to trace the current ethno-political unrest in India’s Northeast back to WWII.



Contact Information

Kristin Stapleton, History Department, University at Buffalo, SUNY

Contact Email

kstaple at buffalo.edu<mailto:kstaple at buffalo.edu>

URL

https://www.buffalo.edu/internationaleducation.html





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